


Half-hot Water

by sylph_feather



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Humor, Phic Phight, phic phight 20, phich phight 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:02:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23827300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sylph_feather/pseuds/sylph_feather
Summary: Phantom disguising as his normal self is a strange prospect, but one must do what needs to be done.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 175





	Half-hot Water

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ghostanimal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostanimal/gifts).



“This is possibly the most stupid idea we’ve ever had,” Danny mumbles. 

“And that’s saying something,” Tuck chirps an aside. 

“Stop moving,” Sam instructs, “I’m trying to make you look like  _ you.”  _

Green eyes blink, baleful as Sam adds a layer of human toned makeup to Danny’s green toned skin. Danny pouts, but his lips are sealed. 

“How long do you think it’ll last?” Tucker hums, thinking back to Skulker’s new weapon— obviously inspired by (if not  _ provided  _ by) Plasmius. 

Danny’s lips part to reveal sharp canines as he makes to reply, but Sam shoots him a glaring look. Exaggeratedly and spitefully, Danny lifts his arms in a frustrated  _ I don’t know  _ motion. 

“Find him an outfit,” Sam instructs to get the two to stop talking. Tucker shrugs and scampers off. 

xXx

By the time he’s back, Tucker has procured gender ambiguous things from Sam’s closet— all black, yes, but just a hoodie with a t-shirt and lounge pants. 

The first step, of course, is removing the jumpsuit. Danny’s friends turn around. 

And wait. 

And wait. 

And— 

“C’mon man, what’s taking so long?” Tucker groans. 

“Uh,” Danny’s small voice comes, “we may have a problem,” he says slowly, drifting over to them. His hair is black, but it drifts like Phantom’s wispy underwater hair; it’s a strange image, to see him so intentionally human, yet still with an aura and glowing green eyes and all the other subtly ghostly things. 

Danny is still in his jumpsuit, just minus the gloves that he has tucked into one of the thing’s sleek pockets— really cementing his Phantom image. 

_ Fantom?  _ Tucker considers as a name for this,  _ or maybe Fentom…? Phentom? Hm.  _

Sam, meanwhile, looks about ready to yell at Danny, asking why he is still in that jumpsuit. 

In answer to the unsaid rant, Danny peels off a shiningly white jumpsuit boot, throwing it to the side. 

For a moment, his foot is bare, and fairly human asides from the skin toned with green blood and the sharpened nails— and then. And then the boot makes a faint hiss, a bubbling sound on Sam’s carpet, and it  _ melts.  _ The leg of Danny’s jumpsuit then  _ also  _ seems to melt, rubbery material dripping into a new boot. 

“That’s weird,” Tucker grunts as Danny settles on shoving all his clothes over the jumpsuit. 

xXx

He can’t transform by the time the makeup is done, or by the time he reaches home from his “study session” (as was his excuse, his lie). 

He tested all the  _ other  _ powers, putting a little float into his step, a little glow to his hands, flickering out of existence and tangibility…  _ only  _ the going-human one was left  _ broken  _ by that stupid, stupid electrical shock. 

He gives his outfit a once over, tugging at things. His skin glows faintly beneath the makeup, and his eyes glow less faintly under the _uncomfortable_ colored contacts (he’d almost gagged, putting the things in his eyes and blinking them into position), hence why he’s wearing sunglasses as additional cover, to keep people from noticing the toxic green light behind the blue. 

Keep people like _ his parents  _ from noticing. Parents that would—  _ don’t think about that.  _ He breathes in, breathes out, puts his feet back on the floor from which he had slightly drifted. 

“I’m home,” he announces slowly, awkwardly bringing up that mask of  _ normal  _ to try to outrun the fact that he was  _ anything but _ . He hopes his voice doesn’t echo too much. From this distance, at least, he doesn’t feel bad about removing the sunglasses (after all, he’d be questioned  _ more  _ about wearing them inside). Danny just tries to slant his eyes down. 

“Hey sweetie,” Maddie says, absentmindedly fiddling with some machine at the table as Jack gives a muffled echo of that around the food he has shoved in his mouth. Jazz gives him a wave from her book, not even glancing up. His mother continues, “how was studying?” 

That alone is enough to make him sigh a little in relief. “Good,” he pushes out with a nervous titter. “You know how great Sam and Tuck are,” he awkwardly adds. He considers excuses to get up to his room— normally he hangs around and chats a little, or listens to his parents rant, or does homework downstairs. But today he doesn’t exactly want to do that, but he  _ also  _ doesn’t want to be too dramatic and draw attention, so— 

“There is a ghost ahead,” the sleek machine beeps, lights on it whirring. 

Jazz, of all of them, freezes and  _ stares  _ at him— and then she stares harder, and Danny can feel his sharp nailed hands itching, and his hair feels scratchy around his pricked ears, and his aura feels  _ bright— _ it’s as though he can see that she’s noticing all that. 

Thankfully, Maddie and Jack on the other hand just laugh. “Silly thing. There’s no signs of a presence of one of those suffering spooks” his father guffaws. 

(Behind him, the kitchen light flickers a little). 

Danny barks a nervous, raucous laugh.  _ You’re being paranoid, they don’t suspect you at all.  _ “I’m, uh,” he pauses, stuttering, “gonna work upstairs today, if that’s alright,” he laughs, and it’s so  _ fake  _ he wants to claw at his throat. “I’m just feeling a little people-d out today, you know?” Danny is at least proud of coming up with a reasonable excuse that doesn’t invite scrutiny, and gives him an out for other extended family time. 

“Aw, alright,” his dad pouts. “How can ya get people-d out?” he grunts with a laugh. 

Maddie rolls her eyes. “You’re just too energetic, Jack. That’s fine, Danny— though do come down for dinner, please. Just a little time, at least,” she smiles. 

_ Oh, crap.  _ Now Danny feels bad. Wednesdays are usually reserved specifically for sit down together dinners; they have them other days, but Wednesday is the  _ always,  _ the guaranteed. 

Danny’s head swirls with excuses from nausea to more introvertedness to headaches. What his mouth, against his better judgement, says is, “OK, yeah! Sounds good.” 

He smiles nervously, lips moving to keep sharp teeth hidden, and he leaves just at a speed just a little under  _ too fast to be considered normal.  _

xXx

Danny feels like throwing something as he angrily paces the air of his bedroom.  _ Why did I say that? I’m so stupid.  _

There’s a knock on his door, and Danny thumps to the ground, scrabbling at his outfit to get it tugged down over his jumpsuit and glow. “Come in,” he stammers. 

Jazz enters. “Sorry to bother you,” she says. 

Danny shrugs. 

And— and she just stands there, staring. Subconscious and feeling all the failures of his disguise, Danny picks at the threads of the hoodie to keep himself from further drawing attention to those features— after all, he now wants nothing more than to fiddle with all of them; to close his eyes even more, to ensure there’s no white patch in his hair that Sam missed, to brush that hair more thoroughly over his sharper ears, to flood the lights in his room so his glow isn’t so noticeable. 

It isn’t until Jazz, still silent, takes a step forward while staring deep into the colored contacts that Danny blinks (and now those contacts feel so uncomfortable and gritty against his eye,  _ ugh)  _ ans says, “uh.” 

“Right,” Jazz says slowly. “Sorry.” 

And then she leaves. 

_ Weird.  _

xXx

Danny is left to his own devices for the rest of the evening, which… asides from the tendency to float as he does them, he doesn’t do anything all that abnormal in relation to his routine. That is: keeping an eye for the foggy breath that came with ghost attacks while doing homework and studies, cleaning his room, and videogaming (or otherwise relaxing). 

Thankfully, the universe  _ for once  _ decides to let Danny have a break, leaving him with finished homework and a clean room (for once), and time aplenty to just relax. 

It isn’t until he smells dinner cooking that the dread kicks in. 

xXx

His parents are calling him, and Danny is having a mental breakdown over sunglasses.  _ Sunglasses.  _

He ditches them, because ultimately the thought that they’d invite  _ more  _ suspicion, or even worse,  _ concern,  _ is just too much. 

“You look a little flushed,” his mother points out, pushing a plate towards him so he can serve himself. 

Danny refrains from making a  _ pale as a ghost  _ joke, or saying something about that’s why his eyes look bright (that would only point them out, even if it excuses them in the same motion), and instead just laughs a breathy laugh. He keeps his lips tucked over his sharpened teeth, nervous. 

Over the whole dinner, Danny can’t restrain himself from that urge to excessively fiddle. He messes with his hair, running sharp nails to comb it into place— make sure it isn’t drifting in that watery way it does sometimes, make sure it’s covering his pointed ears. He stares at his skin, checking for makeup smudges, carefully eats so that the makeup that feels so heavy on his lips does not become overly smudged and so that his teeth are not to exposed. 

It’s calculated, it’s exhausting, and it’s frankly overdoing it for his rather selectively observant parents. 

_ What reason would they have to suspect me?  _ Danny constantly reminds himself as he stares at the food to keep his glowing eyes from their faces. 

He babbles; he knows not about what, just generalizations. School, how his tests have gone, assignments he finds interesting (he is a nerd at the core, despite his grades). Sam and Tucker and the renewed fight of diet. 

Thankfully, his family is enough to carry the conversation as well— especially, of course, Jack (as usual).  _ Not  _ per usual, Jazz does not participate. No, she spends dinner doggedly trying to meet his eyes, and Danny spends it vehemently avoiding hers. 

_ Never  _ would he have thought Jazz, the rational, logical, sister that didn’t believe in ghosts would be the biggest threat to his secret. 

“I’m going to get some more,” she hums, and walks behind Danny. 

His shoulders tense, body gone rigid. 

Her hand just ruffles his hair— he feels it tickle at the edge of his ear, meaning it was  _ exposed...  _ and Jazz just gives him an odd smile, meeting his eyes briefly (he dropped guard on that feature out of surprise), before spooning more food on her plate. 

...Danny doesn’t look the gift horse in the mouth ( _ or  _ the eyes), and he counts his blessings. 

xXx

Sleep is, apparently, not something that comes easy in ghost form. Danny wouldn’t have known  _ before  _ all this, considering any time he was knocked out or fell asleep ordinarily, he’d revert to being a human, and he was never stupid enough to be a ghost in his own house as he did something as vulnerable as  _ sleep.  _

Emphasis on that he  _ was  _ never stupid enough, on that past tense, because that is exactly what is doing now. 

...Or, trying to do. 

Instead, he floats a little above the bed, unable to keep concentration on staying grounded while trying to perform the activity of little concentration. A hard balancing act.

Really, after what felt like forever, Danny concludes it is highly likely that ghosts weren’t exactly  _ made  _ to sleep. That, or they weren’t made to do so at night; the darkness sends his cells abuzz, and explains to him why so many  _ freaky things  _ happened in the dark because he  _ so  _ wants to just go crazy. It is almost like Danny had drunk caffeine too late in the day, and now he’s gotten jittery— except he  _ didn’t  _ do that, so. 

For good measure, he tries again on the human form front. Just a faint white spark— better than  _ nothing,  _ at least, and a little improvement considering it  _ was  _ nothing last he had checked. If it still was without improvement by now, maybe Danny would’ve worried about dying the  _ rest  _ of the way by an idiotic taser, but that improvement indicated he was (probably) fine, so he didn’t need to have one of his many existential crises. 

So he stares, 

— stares… stares… stares… 

He feels his lids getting heavy. 

xXx

Maddie shakes him awake. 

“Rough night?” she asks, and Danny gives a nervous laugh, startlingly awake as memories jolt back. 

Maddie frowns at her fingers, rubbing together waxy makeup, but shrugs it off. 

Unable to stop himself, Danny’s eyes (crusty and uncomfortable with a night of sleeping with contacts in; the things feel more like shards in his eyes than ever) flick down to look at the hand his mother grabbed… to find it unsmudged. 

No, wait.

He runs a finger along it, and makeup comes off, but it reveals human toned, pink tinted skin beneath. 

His mom continues, oblivious to Danny’s joy— “I had trouble sleeping, too— trying to fix that new invention, because it kept saying there was a  _ ghost  _ here.” She laughs in a scoff. 

Danny can’t project that same confidence, but he  _ can  _ laugh anyways, fully human once again. 

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: by @ecto-american/Ghostanimal
> 
> “Danny being stuck as Phantom and forced to deal with situations that he'd normally be as Fenton (like going to school, having a family dinner, etc)”


End file.
